Travel

Monday, 29 September 2014

Not long after arriving in Bangkok in 1973 I heard the story of Jim Thompson’s strange disappearance in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands Easter Sunday 1967. This was the tragic tale of a prominent American businessman and former OSS officer who had founded the premier silk weaving company in Thailand at the end of WWII. His company had brought a dying cottage industry in that country’s impoverished northeast - not just back to life - but to prominence in Thailand as well as, ultimately, throughout the world.

By 1973, the mystery of Thompson’s disappearance was still unsolved. It remains thus today. Furthermore, it wasn’t until a few years later that his family decided to have him declared dead for legal and financial reasons. That was, of course, a difficult emotional decision.

Yet the Thai Silk Company lived and lives on run by its talented and able staff. Its designs and materials resulted in the most innovative and highest quality silk fabric sold in Thailand. Jim Thompson’s uniquely beautiful house – called the House on the Klong - which he had created from six traditional upcountry teak houses and set in a forest of tropical greenery next to one of Bangkok’s canals (klongs) was, and is, filled with antiques and artifacts he had collected during his decades living in Southeast Asia.(Above photos of Jim Thompson fabrics by PHKushlis, rose pillow cover, patterned dress, and four pillows, September 28, 2014 ).

An aside: This is not a travel post but, if you plan a trip to Bangkok, Jim Thompson’s beautiful house should be on your tour list as should the Thai Silk Company on Suriwong Rd.

Thompson himself, though, was a mystery and that contributes to questions surrounding his disappearance. Joshua Kurlantzick’s The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War (John Wiley and Sons, 2011) tries hard to solve that mystery but in the end the trail runs cold. The only thing we’re pretty sure of is that Thompson had a number of enemies as well as friends, was likely not eaten by wild tigers or other four legged predators then inhabiting the Cameron Highlands, did not commit suicide and would not have taken a fatal misstep and slipped into some ravine.

Instead, his body suddenly vanished without a trace.

So the question becomes and remains who “dunnit.” In short, until and unless the CIA opens its secret file on the Thompson case no one will ever know what the agency knew and the CIA itself will continue to be one of the suspects. There are also other potential non-US government culprits but the CIA’s continued stone-walling just raises suspicions of an intelligence service accountable only to itself at the height of the Vietnam War – perhaps even silencing one of its own.

I’m not sure that the book’s title isn’t a bit of a misnomer because Thompson was far from “ideal” although one could certainly have called him an Ideals or Idealistic man. I’m also not sure why the subtitle, “Jim Thompson and the American Way of War,” features so prominently except that Thompson, who had served in the OSS on the Thai border with Laos and Cambodia during World War II, had known, worked with and been largely sympathetic to the Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese nationalist leaders at that time and, unsurprisingly, disagreed vehemently with a post WWII US policy that sided with the then colonial powers thereafter ultimately thrusting the region into the fulcrum of an American led global militarily dominated anti-Communist crusade.

This costly war needn’t have happened if successive presidents had listened to people like Thompson, French journalist, Vietnam scholar and American academic Bernard Fall, Cornell University Professor George Kahin and State Department official Paul Kattenburg. Kattenburg, like Thompson, had also served in the OSS. Instead, these experts were shunted aside and ostracized as a result of their courage to speak out.

I had previously wondered if Thompson had been gay because he had been single so much of his life and kept his personal life to himself. This was, well, Bangkok, where sexual permissiveness and possibilities of all kinds were legion. Kurlantzick set me straight on this one. Not only was Thompson not gay but he had been briefly married and divorced to an American woman before his OSS assignment and perhaps more significantly while in Bangkok had become the lover of Irina Yost, Ambassador Charles Yost’s wife whom he had hoped to marry. She, however, decided to stay with the Ambassador and their four children. Later Thompson had short-term affairs with unnamed but apparently numerous diplomatic spouses including from the US Embassy.

US-Thai Relations too black and white

I am troubled by much of Kurlantzich’s characterizations of US-Thai relations during the 1950s and 1960s or that, in particular, the US should be so heavily blamed for causing successive military governments in Thailand to the detriment of promoting democratic governance. This criticism is simply too black and white and relying perhaps too heavily upon information from and about the businessman Willis Bird, a contemporary of Thompson’s who profited enormously from the US military build-up in Southeast Asia, and the Thai democracy leader Pridi Banonyong who was deposed in a military coup early on and spent the remainder of his life in exile.

I’d like to see State Department documents and Embassy reporting cables for additional parts of the story – documents Kurlantzich did not research. What were the options? Was Thailand yet ready for multiparty government? And where did the royal family fit into all of this? Strangely, Kurlantzich hardly mentions the Thai royal family at all – yet it was clear to me that the palace held important political strings as it operated from behind a veil of secrecy before, during and after my tenure in Bangkok – although that veil may not be as opaque today and the counsel as wise as during my time there from 1973-1975.

True, I wasn’t in Thailand during Jim Thompson's years there but neither was Kurlantzich. Yet when I worked at the US Embassy – in a traditional Thai compound on Sathorn Tai as a member of the US Information Service staff – the US troop build-up was near or at its peak and the US military relationship with the Thai government rested on a handshake (or wai).

Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Who’d have thought it? Come spring, Beijing’s inner circle is a horticulturalist’s delight. Highways and boulevards turn into bowers of expertly pruned, flowering fruit trees, apple blossom white, pink plum, the shocking deep orange of peach trees. Commercial and residential buildings soar like whimsically-topped, glittery sculptures above gardens with manicured grass and masses of tall shade trees, interrupted by parking lots, of course. The era of the bicycle is long gone in Beijing. Autos rule the roads, often bumper to bumper, in fact.

Walking around in the vicinity of my impersonal but comfortable hotel, I was astounded to find myself reminded of traditional Chinese paintings—mountain, forest, sky. Clearly the ancient art of landscaping and the love of gardens hasn’t been lost. Given the high initial cost of such extensive plantings and the equally high cost of impeccable annual maintenance, it’s also clear that the ruling Chinese Communist party intends make central Beijing into a showcase city, the perfect frame for the imperial elegance of the Forbidden City.

In fact, it was a bit too tidy for me, and the toddlers negotiating equipment in a little play area were almost too decorous, like the beautifully dressed little girls with big bows in their hair whom I’d encountered in Soviet Moscow’s parks so many years ago. It was obvious they’d get a scolding if they muddied up their Mary Janes. In Beijing, meanwhile, no candy wrappers took flight in the breeze, and although there were plenty of smokers, the sidewalks were miraculously free of cigarette butts.

However, my fairly brief meanderings on foot revealed a few departures from perfection. I came across one trash can diver. Also, a worried-looking cycle delivery man resting his legs on a park bench, having first stowed his shoes neatly underneath. His thin old socks don't have holes, yet. And the crowd milling around in front of the old Beijing railroad station was definitely less than middle class. Families squatting amidst their bags and bundles looked as if they’d just arrived from the country, and there were even some beggars, caps removed and set bowl-like to receive contributions.

Otherwise, most of the people I met on the street in that area of Beijing were nicely, even fashionably dressed, and the cars that purred by in a stream broken only by stop lights shimmered glossy and new in what passed for sunlight. Of course, they were new, for the most part. Maybe in ten years time traffic will contain a more normal mix, including old models and rust buckets. And maybe today's new buildings, having been exposed to Beijing’s dirty air for a decade or more, will be more than a little grimy, too.

Sensing a stage-prop quality to the Beijing I’d seen so far, I set myself to looking for something like unburnished reality as I rode out of the city en route to one of the access points for the Great Wall. Sure enough, mile by mile from ground zero, the buildings got older, and even the newer ones were not nearly so tall or as exciting architecturally as those toward the center. Shoe boxes standing on end. Still, for the longest time, there was the redeeming presence of reasonably well-groomed greenery: trees pruned, hedges clipped.

And then I saw it! A plastic bag caught in a chain link fence, the fence itself all tangled up in a half dead vine. From that point on, nature in all its weedy indiscipline took over. In vacant lots. On cloverleaves between intersecting highways. To right and left, this too: the usual detritus of urban life. Old tires. Empty crates. Battered-looking construction equipment. Jumbles of old cabling. And, as I soon learned, away from the main arteries, that’s what Chinese roadsides generally look like. Junk yards. Equipment depots and lumber yards. Garages and repair shops with battered vehicles on blocks. Over time, I passed half- abandoned villages, roadside bars with shabbily-dressed old men playing cards just outside the door; uninviting eateries with motorcycles parked out front, motel-like flop houses for long distance truck drivers and the truly down and out. Clear evidence that not everyone is making it in modern China.

I also got a bird’s eye view of this left-behind China as my flight took off from Beijing’s monstrously large new airport en route to Dunhuong via Xian. There it was, just below: a great splotch of semi-industrial slums. Warehouses and truck parks. Vast accumulations of leaky oil drums. Light industrial operations, some housed in brick buildings with a Dickensian look. Dreary-looking apartment blocks. Not a tree in sight.

And then, well before the plane reached cruising altitude, Beijing’s ugly secret disappeared. We sliced through the smog into clear air and blue sky.

Which reminds me of the amusing sight that presented itself as my trans-Pacific flight was descending into Beijing. The pollution blanket was firmly tucked around the city, which was invisible, except for a scattering of buildings tall enough to pierce through it. Some of those skyscrapers appeared to be residential. Imagine! Paying an astronomical price for a penthouse with no view—except, perhaps, into the distant living rooms of other penthouses with no view. Unfortunately, strapped into my seat for landing, I wasn’t able to take a picture.

That evening, as the sun was close to setting, I did take a photo from my hotel room. Visibility was murky at best, which means there wasn’t much of a view for those inhabiting the somewhat lower, but still pricy levels of the new towers either! And note: I wasn’t shooting through a screen or through smudged glass. The window was open, flooding the room with very dirty, but cooler air. When I'd arrived it was unbearably hot, but housekeeping had informed me that it was much too early, being only the last week of March, to start up the air conditioning.

Nevertheless, I was lucky during my time in Beijing. The sky was usually gray, the air more polluted than I would put up with on a daily basis, especially since I’m used to the perpetual azure of New Mexico, whose capital has the cleanest urban air in the U.S. But by Beijing standards, the air wasn’t bad. And sometimes, as in the photo above, the sky was blue!

But my Beijing guide didn't need blue skies to make her happy. “The sun’s out!” she exclaimed one afternoon. She looked ecstatic. Now, usually, when the sun is shining brightly, there are shadows which translate into defined patches of cool shade. Not that day. Looking up, I couldn’t even tell where the sun was. But the smog, obviously, had thinned. The day was brighter. Terrific!

Gray skies. Day after day. Very depressing. Even in the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts the air was gray and hazy from tiny dust particles swept aloft by the lightest breezes. But there was good news in the desert or so it seemed. Approaching Urumqi from the South by road, we drove through wind farms that stretched far beyond the horizon in all directions. Some turbines appeared to be brand new, others as if they’d been abraded by years of sand storms. This would have been a heartening sight, if we hadn’t just traversed another area where oil was being pumped out.

So which will it be, for energy, in China? Oil or wind? Well, there's not much oil, but something else is very plentiful. Coal.

Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, it turns out, has terrible smog problems. It’s located smack dab in the middle of coal mining country. Coal, once extracted, has to be transported to points of use, but no problem! Urumqi is well served by railroads. Surely the coal would travel by rail, I thought. Wrong! Mounded high, trussed in place under canvas, it’s carried in caravans of huge trucks, each belching soot-heavy exhaust, the kind of tail pipe emissions you never want to tailgate.

“Why?”I asked my guide of the moment.

“Rail may be cleaner," he replied, “but road is cheaper.”

Here are the two companion pieces from my recent China trip, one on Lhasa (http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2014/06/red-flag-over-lhasa.htmlBeijing) and one on Kashgar (http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2014/05/kanishka-in-kashgar-a-report-from-the-fringes-of-the-chinese-empire.html)

Monday, 02 June 2014

Also see two companion pieces: http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2014/05/ kanishka-in-kashgar-a-report-from-the-fringes-of-the-chinese-empire.html and http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2014/06/beijing-the-beautiful-and-the-not-so.html

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My trilingual Tibetan guide met me at the airport, an hour’s drive from Lhasa via a smooth new highway. (China has lots of smooth new highways.) The road runs along a braided river delivering snow and glacier melt to Tibet’s capital and largest city, which lies in a long, broad valley.

“The Brahmaputra,” my guide said, which thrilled me. I’d met this river before, way downstream. It carries life-sustaining water to points South and East, to Bangladesh, that is, and to Assam in India.

The Brahmaputra (aka the Tsangpo in Chinese) unites with the Ganges and flows eventually into the Bay of Bengal—which reminds me: China is also the source of the Ganges River, without which India’s northern heartland would be far less fertile. The Mekong and the Indus rivers also arise in China. Should Beijing decide to dam any or all of these rivers, much or all of South and Southeast Asia would be begging for fresh water.

Eyeing a Greater Tibet

I wonder what China’s terms would be. Draconian, if China’s present East and South China seas policy is indicative. Hydraulic engineers in Delhi must have nightmares. Leaders, too. Would Delhi have to cede Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, which Beijing already claims? Many well-rooted peoples living in these border areas spring from Tibetan stock and share Tibet’s Buddhist culture, which, Beijing claims, makes them fair game for absorption into China.

That would not go over well with the locals.

I’ve spent some time in Ladakh and in Arunachal Pradesh, personal travel in the former, diplomatic business in the latter. I’ve hiked in Bhutan and Nepal, too. Never in these Tibet-influenced areas have I met one person who’d trade his or her current citizenship for the heavy-handed rule of Beijing. This goes in spades for those whose parents and grandparents fled Mao’s eradication approach to Tibetan culture after 1959. Subsequent Chinese regimes have been subtler but equally set on eliminating cultural differentiators between Tibetans and Han.

Tibetans who live in the Tibet “Autonomous” Region and spill over into adjacent provinces, like Sichuan, would also prefer freedom from Beijing’s culture-blighting embrace, but voicing such dreams is dangerous. That’s why so many monks (and at least one nun) have set themselves on fire. Given Buddhism’s reverence for life, this is a very strong statement, so I decided to see what I could see for myself. Is China the beneficent modernizing force it claims to be? Or not? Would my three day visit suffice for any insight at all?

Not Many Prayer Flags

So, we were driving along the river toward Lhasa, a landscape of brown fields and pale green poplars contained by rapidly-rising mountains to either side. It was midday. Many farmers had interrupted their spring plowing to gather in twos or threes for lunch. Very bucolic. Especially the use of horses. Not very modern.

We’d passed clusters of farmhouses and some ordinary-looking villages, too, when suddenly I registered what I was seeing. Flags. Not the ubiquitous (as in normal Tibetan Buddhist locales) strings of red-blue-green- &-yellow prayer flags that are meant to send waves of compassion to all beings. Red flags. Symbols of the People’s Republic of China.

“The farmers have to fly them,” my Tibetan guide said, his emphasis on the word that signifies compulsion. He didn't elaborate. It was clear where his loyalties lay—and more so, the next day, when he excused himself to prostrate three times before one of many golden images of Chenresig, the boddhisatva of compassion, while we were visiting Jokhang temple.

In Lhasa, I soon discovered, those red flags were everywhere: marching along both sides of the boulevards, waving over store fronts, flying above multi-story buildings, adorning traffic circles, overwhelming the delicate pastels of fruit tree blossoms in the parks. Red. Red. Red. Although I was in the capital of the Autonomous Region of Tibet, not once did I glimpse the distinctive flag that Tibetans unfurl so proudly when they are free to do so. Even on the precincts of famous monasteries that should have been spider-webbed with prayer flags, the prayer flag count was modest—and the flag displayed on a staff rising from the highest point of the ultra-sacred Jokhang temple was the harsh red banner of the People’s Republic of China. The message was clear. Cling to your superstitions, but bow first and always to Beijing!

Piety under Surveillance

Lhasa residents and country people making a pilgrimage to Lhasa may light butter lamps, they may twirl prayer wheels, huge or hand-held, and they may perform the two kilometer kora around the Potala, which is to say circumambulate clockwise, but they'd better be orderly about it. The eyes of the Chinese authorities are always on the alert. Within the center of the city, a small city, with a population of only 250,000, I came upon three large Army compounds, in one of which, not quite concealed by its high walls, I glimpsed row on row of buildings that must have been barracks. Their gates were imposing, even elegant. They were also very wide—I could imagine armored personnel carriers zipping out quite handily—and always surmounted by a brazen red flag. Very photogenic. But I can’t show you any pix. Even when I tried for a shot through the inky dark windows of our vehicle, my guide went into panic mode.

“No pictures!” he rasped. His voice trembled with terror. No one could see through those windows. No one could have told whether I was fumbling with f-stops or blowing my nose. But my guide’s fear was so extreme I lowered my camera.

So Big Han Brother was watching. Men and occasionally women in uniform were visible, standing in the shade of this building or that, hovering just around the corner, strolling here and there in the old market area. As with the red flags, once I’d noticed one officer, I saw them everywhere. But the no camera rule covered the security forces, too. Very clever. If the watchers can’t be photographed, they don’t exist, do they?

The Legibility Test

Meanwhile, store signs in the old Tibetan market neighborhood were delivering the same message I’d noted a few days before in the commercial districts of Kashgar. Because Lhasa too is located in an “autonomous” region, the local version of the shop’s name had to appear on all storefronts along with the relevant Chinese characters. Ah—but which had primacy? Which could be read with ease from a distance? Not the Tibetan. And my Tibetan guide, echoing my Uighur guide, complained of Tibetan neighborhoods destroyed to make way for wealthier Han store owners. Even the primitive brick works along the river have Chinese proprietors, I discovered. And, naturally, the big construction companies transforming the look of Lhasa are not Tibetan-owned either.

Shades of Kashgar and Urumqui! In Lhasa, too, posters and billboards caught the eye and delivered the Beijing line wherever the locals could be expected to congregate. I saw them outside the Jokhang Temple. I saw them in the old market, whose picturesque concentration of open-front shops displaying Tibetan goods invites tourist photography, thereby “proving” to the world that Tibetan culture survives. Most egregiously, where the kora route around the Potala runs through a little park, a series of posters stands ready to ambush the pious: kitchy versions of Chinese scrolls featuring artsy brushwork, blossoms, pines, long-gowned scholars and/or neatly-dresssed, attentive children. My guide translated for me. The theme, mostly in Chinese, was harmony, harmony, harmony. And more harmony.

Hmmmm. Seems to me that so much harping on good will and cooperation between Han and Tibetan suggests a serious lack thereof. And maybe the cute little sermons also meant to serve as a warning to Tibetans with dangerously “splitist” thoughts. In short, behave!

Amnesia via Urban Renewal

Another propaganda theme redundantly hammered in was development, often via “before” and “after” billboards contrasting shabby old neighborhoods with the glittery glass towers of the high (in Tibet: just higher) rise future. Their ubiquity in Lhasa (and every other city I visited) suggested that many locals might prefer elements of an unreconstructed city. We know from scattered protests thgroughout China that they'd definitely like better compensation for forced removals.

In Tibet, as elsewhere, there’s big money to be made in redevelopment, but the development-is-good-for-you message seemed especially strident in minority areas like Kashgar and Lhasa. Perhaps the authorities believe that the mental traces of a resistant culture will be easier to erase once the physical reminders are gone. In any event, it's good security policy to break up concentrations of suspect peoples. Meanwhile, if Tibetans are so pleased with the Beijing-imposed modernizing of their old city, why are all the preachy billboards necessary?

Perhaps my biggest surprise in Lhasa had nothing to do with China. It was my own strongly negative reaction to the Potala, which used to be the Dalai Lama’s palace and the seat of governance for a theocratic state. On the one hand, topping a pimple of a hill in the center of the city, it was smaller than I expected. The usual camera angles magnify its height. On the other hand, it would have been a monstrous imposition on the small, low city that Lhasa certainly was in 1959, when the Red army arrived in force and the current Dalai Lama and so many other Tibetans fled to India.

Shades of the Vatican! I thought. Hardly a proper place for a spiritual leader to live. Should Tibet ever be free and independent (which is unlikely) or even truly autonomous (which is only remotely possible), the best outcome would allow the Potala to remain as a museum, while the returned or new Dalai Lama is housed more simply and appropriately. The days of profligate, luxury-loving princes of the church or sect are over, as even the new Pope in Rome knows.

And here's one of the perks of clerical privilege. Only the common people have to groan their way up to the top, step by step, on foot. VIPs (including the Dalai Lama in his heyday) arrive by car at an entry on the unseen side. Is that why we always get photos of the one elevation?

Whatever its function in the future, however, the unique structure that is the Potala will never again preside over Lhasa as it once did. The new buildings are unimpressive compared to the skyscrapers in China’s mega-cities, but they are inexorably changing the scale of the city. The Potala will not dominate; it will be surrounded, encircled, caged.

The Inhuman Factor

And yet, for all the gratuitous red flags and the rapid, dramatic altering of skylines, what stuck me most profoundly in Lhasa and elsewhere during my visit to China wasn’t this mushrooming of office buildings, residential towers and luxury hotels (the latest in Beijing plans to bill itself as a seven star destination!), but the lack of vivacity on the ground. China is wealthy now. The predictable architectural symbols of wealth are proliferating, but where’s the noise, the buzz, the laughter in public places? Where’s the bustle? Where’s the exuberance? Where’s the spark of electricity that passes from stranger to stranger in cities where people are free to express themselves?

In New York or London or New Delhi or Tokyo you walk down the street and you are part of one mini drama after another. It’s exciting. No so in China. Especially not so in the “autonomous” regions. Beijing has created order—and shopping malls (my favorite in Beijing is the Big Boom mall for furnishing your chic, new, multi-million-yuan apartment). So the deal is this: the emergent middle class is free to spend money like crazy, so long as it keeps its collective mouth shut. Now Beijing is trying to impose that order and those values on its "minority" peoples. Maybe if Beijing created more good jobs and serious spending power for Tibetans and Uighurs, they would be less restive.

Postscript

In addition to indulging my political curiosity while I was in China, I ticked off a number of important tourist sites—the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall, etc.—and visited some less familiar places that awed me with their finesse and beauty, especially the Buddhist caves in Dunhuang and Turpan. I couldn't photograph the interior of any cliff-hanging caves, but here's a photo of a musician, who added enchantment to a lovely oasis in the desert. Yet, all too often as I moved around China, the human element was lacking. Served everywhere by dutiful functionaries following procedure perfectly, people whose eyes never sparkled while their lips produced the prescribed smile, I've never felt so lonely and isolated, even in other situations where lack of a shared language complicated communication. Fortunately, I’d arranged for guides whose time and attention I didn't have to share. Each was almost over prepared with a long, fact-filled official spiel for every site, but each was also delighted to scrap the script and engage in candid, private conversation on politics, religion, personal goals, whatever. They smiled. They laughed! The Chinese, I'd been told, recoil from touch, but I got farewell hugs at several airports. I thank them.

Of course, there’s life in China, the intellectual and creative sort as well as the human sort, but it seems to have retreated underground, where it’s safe from the authorities. As a result, all the new construction seemed rather ghoulish to me, like fingernails growing from the digits of a corpse that belongs, not to the Chinese people, or the Tibetans, or the Uighurs, who are all forced to play dead, but to the all-suffocating party that rules.

That said, I'll end with a more soothing image that was hard to come by, since photography (sigh!) was also largely forbidden in temples.

Monday, 20 January 2014

The US State Department recently issued a travel advisory to American citizens planning to attend the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia in February and March.Often the media ignores or fails to publish the Department’s Travel Advisories. This one’s circulation, however, has received relatively widespread coverage – from Fox News to the New York Times almost as soon as it hit the web.

State’s Advisory contains practical information for first time vistors to Russia and reminders to more seasoned ones particularly those traveling to the troubled Northern Caucasus where Sochi is located.

My advice: if this is a trip you plan to undertake, print the advisory out before you head off, take a copy with you, heed its contents, and watch the website for updates.The information will have been coordinated with the US Embassy Consular Section in Moscow. And a special unit from the US Consular Section (tough but likely busy duty?) will be at the Games to help American citizens in distress.

Russia has changed greatly since it became the successor state to the Soviet Union in 1991 and certainly since the Moscow Olympics in 1980 - but still not all is sweetness and light.

Laying out the welcome mat

Putting aside politics – and whatever one thinks of President (for life?) Vladimir Putin – the country, for the most part, will lay out the welcome mat to Olympic athletes and guests:Much international prestige rides on the conduct of successful games.Besides the Russians are proud of their own athletic prowess especially in winter sports and want to come off as winners (who can blame them) in the international spotlight:sports and international politics intermingle in the Russian psyche.

Furthermore, Sochi itself is a long time domestic Black Sea tourist destination for Russians seeking refuge in a less harsh climate – namely the chance to bask in the sun - dating back to the days of the Czars and the country wants to develop it into a popular international resort.

If there’s one thing that Russia will do to make the Games go off without a hitch is impose tight security.American counter-terrorism experts may grouse that they have not been involved – at least that’s what Fox News reported – but expect the Russian Federation’s police-state security experts to do everything they can to keep the sites protected from potential terrorist acts.That doesn’t mean they won’t happen: remember Atlanta, Munich and for that matter the 2013 Boston Marathon (which if US counter terrorism experts had been in closer contact with their Russian counterparts perhaps could have been avoided).

Inevitable politics

The dilemma is that the Olympics, regardless of location, are natural attractions to groups and individuals intent upon making political statements before an international audience of millions.This stage doesn’t come their way all that often. Such statements have been made through peaceful demonstrations or occasionally premeditated acts of murder. Those who make them are looking for front page headlines and top of the news coverage.

The Russian government is fighting jut the latest round of the Chechen rebellion since the Soviet Union collapsed. Sochi is very much a piece of the troubled North Caucasus.

The Russian authorities succeeded in regaining power in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, only to have the conflict spread to neighboring regions like Dagistan and among other ethnic Caucasian minorities - like a vial of mercury dropped on the floor.

Two suicide attacks in Volgograd – Russia's transportation hub into the North Caucasus - in December followed by the accidental traffic death in Moscow of a major Chechen leader just show how acts of domestic terrorism are not far away.The Boston Marathon murders last April by two radicalized Chechen young men just show how far the troubles can reach.

Friday, 14 June 2013

Delhi was still the smallish, palimpsest city the British
handed over to independent India when I first lived here.I fell in love with the whole of it: the
convoluted lanes of old Delhi; the impressive remnants of earlier civilizations;
the garden-like beauty of the area now called Lutyen’s Delhi for the architect
who designed an add-on to replace Calcutta as capital of the Raj; the Jumna
River, lovely at dawn, but even then blackened by sewage; the purple-blossomed
jacaranda trees at the height of the hot season; the intoxicating coolness of the first rains of monsoon. I read history. I studied Hindi. I bicycled everywhere.

Things Change

Coming back, again and again, over the years, I saw Delhi change, old bungalows razed,
skyscrapers shooting up, residential colonies proliferating, slums ditto,
especially on the other side of the river, traffic clogging the roads
and spewing plumes of exhaust that mixed with cook fire soot to create a smog
that madebreathing suicidal. Seeing
Delhi evolve, I saw mostly loss and mourned.Like most people who fall
in love, I’d wanted nothing to change. I
drifted through Delhi like a maiden in a Moghul miniature yearning for an
unretrievable lover.

But cities are like people.The richly experienced don’t want to be sixteen again. As for
cities, without change they stagnate or die.At best, they become quaint tourist traps.A city that’s confident and full of vitality,
however, can preserve a generous taste of history while building boldly for the
future.This, by and large, is what Delhi
is doing, I think, and the ever-expanding Metro system makes the contemporary
version work, despite the everlasting nuisance of the construction process.

Metro Makes a Difference

The river’s still a disgrace.Slums continue to grow.Too much farmland has sprouted satellite
towns with soaring buildings or sprawling residential colonies for the moderately
or outrageously better off.The sky
seldom yields the least hint of blue, but the worst has been reversed: the air is much cleaner, which is good for
everyone’s health. Buses run on natural
gas.Cars, trucks and auto rickshaws no
longer spew inky exhaust. And the declaredly green Metro system keeps
tens of thousands of vehicles off the streets. I did a quick count of the
motorcycles and cars parked at one line’s terminus:nearly a thousand two-wheelers and about
eighty sedans.In fact, something like eighteen Metro stations are served by parking lots where space fills as soon as it
empties. Metro may be scorned by the upper
classes and it’s irrelevant to the poorest of the poor, but it’s a great boon
to the exploding, upwardly mobile lower-middle and middle-middle classes presumed
to be transforming India.

My Metro Plan

Visiting Delhi this time, I hoped to let my time-eroded city-of-the-past
go. If I couldn’t warmly embrace the new one, I might at least depart with
sympathy for Delhi’s latest avatar. Metro, burrowing underground at the center, surfacing
at the periphery, would serve as my updated Garuda. My plan was this: at the end of each of the
many-colored lines̶ red, blue, yellow, violet, etc., I’d disembark
and survey the outer edges of the city; zipping along underground, I’d play
sociologist, learning what I could of and from my fellow passengers.And
there’d be this advantage, too: it’s the height of the hot season (over 43 C.
equals over 110 F.) and Metro is delightfully cool.

What’s instantly clear is how Metro knits this vast
urbanization (some 20 million and growing) into a single city.(Well, sort of, as I note in concluding.) Meanwhile, most everything’s accessible quickly and quite affordably,
especially for commuting workers or students with a monthly pass.And after you’ve climbed a hundred steps or
ridden the occasional escalator (elevators always available) to the superheated
surface, you’ll find an armada of auto rickshaws to take you the last
mile.You might find some old fashioned
taxis, too, but one of the huge changes in Delhi is the shrinkage in the fleet
of yellow-roofed Ambassadors trolling the
streets for passengers. The taxi driver
who transported me and my luggage from airport to hotel was bitter.Metro’s destroying his business, he grumbled.Often, these past few days, I’ve wished I
could avert incipient heat exhaustion and reduce general sweatiness by hailing a
taxi and asking the cabbie to turn on the AC.There’s another lost pleasure for those with rupees enough for real
taxis.By cab you can feast your eyes on
the vistas and tree-lined streets of New Delhi. You may also get caught in the all-day gridlock of Old Delhi.

Old and New Juxtoposed

But emerging into the sunlight via Metro provides some amazing
collage-like moments.My favorite so far
was the vision of an elegant red sandstone tower thrusting up through the
greenery shortly after we’d surfaced on the yellow line heading to the
mushrooming city of Gurgaon.It was the
236 foot tall Qtub Minar, dating to the 13th century, when a Muslim
ruler caused it to be built of stone pillaged from a much earlier Hindu temple,
some of which also survives. Different, but equally dramatic: the 108 foot polychrome of the monkey god Hanuman that looms over the Karol Bagh station.

Talk about the
palimpsest process!In Delhi the past is
always poking through.Via surviving
buildings and ruins.Via design motifs.Via music and all else that goes into culture.
Compare the busy composition of ancient reliefs showing dancers and drummers
with the frantic choreography of Hindi film, for example. Only the most obtuse observer concludes that
the past is dead in this city.And
beyond the tangibles of history stand the great epics, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, supposedly sited hereabouts, whose themes continue to capture the
popular imagination.

The Technical Details

So the Japanese picked a winner in the 1990s, when they
underwrote a $6.2 billion project with a 60% loan.Statistics for phases I and II, now complete,
are as follows: trackage of 128
kilometers; 35 underground stations, one the second deepest in the world; 142
stations in all; fleet of 280 trains, each carrying 2290 passengers, 240 seated,
but often packing in hundreds more, or so my own crushed-in experience suggests;
train frequency about every five-six minutes; wonderfully clear signage. Technologically, the Delhi Metro planners borrowed
globally to build a “world class,” earthquake-proof facility that currently
serves 2.2 million riders daily and makes a profit, which means the loan is
being repaid.

Up-to-dateness means a lot of things.You can recharge your cell phone while a
Metro train is underway̶if you aren’t talking or texting, as so many
people do, flabby-waisted matrons with bulging handbags on their laps as well as school
boys weighed down by book-filled backpacks.During one trip I found myself near a little family, the wife seated,
the man standing over her, ear buds implanted, listening to music, I suppose.A toddler shuttled between them,
whining.Daddy picked up the child,
planted one bud in his child’s ear and presto! a smile of delight and little
hands beating time to the music. Contemporary
fatherhood on Metro.

Security Matters

There are other signs of the times, too.This is a dangerous world, and entering the
very busy Rajiv Chawk station I passed by a guard balancing his machine gun on
a low wall of sand bags.In addition, at
every station my carry-ons were xrayed while I was wanded by a female officer
in khaki. Re security, Metro also offers this protection
from more conventional threats: no high speed capsules to be trapped in.Cars connect all but seamlessly.A single corridor runs continuously from train’s
head to train’s tail.

Metro trains and stations are reputed to be wholly safe for
women travelling alone.(The same can’t
be said for all exit neighborhoods late at night.Delhi dailies highlight the horror stories.) What’s
more, although women may and do ride in any car, a whole car on every train is for
women only. Normally I distance myself from gender segregation, but ladies’
cars (with boarding points designated by̶ugh! ̶ pink
signs) tend to be less cram-jammed.Bye-bye principles.Hello
comfort.

Still, brutal as the crush in the rest of the train
may get, young or even middle-aged men are usually quick to cede a seat to pregnant
women and or to frail old men. Once, for
that matter, a very chivalrous, very ancient gentleman rose to give his seat to
this younger, but far from girlish strap-hanger. No way could I accept his seat, but his gallantry
shamed a paunchy young man into getting to his feet. That seat I happily occupied.

Other, more innovative points of etiquette have evolved on
Metro.For instance, it may seem that no
seats are available, but a row of seated women will scootch together to make room
for a couple of female standees.What
does this tell you about women’s instinct to make the world a better place for
everyone?

Gorgeous Girls

Meanwhile, what’s the younger generation coming to,
fashion-wise, according to my Metro survey?Pierced noses are out: no diamonds flashing above a nostril. Bindhis on
the forehead are out, too. No red
dots.No sparkly pasties.And tight jeans are in for the college crowd. Tops run the gamut from tees to smocks, none of which need to cover the arms or tush anymore,
though cleavage is clearly not in.School girls are more likely to wear the traditional salwar-kamiz.But their tunics don’t billow.They skim the body, and baggy trousers have
been replaced by Nehru-style churidars or tights.And not black tights either.Red tights. Neon pink tights.Cyan and emerald green tights. The influence of Bollywood, perhaps?As for the long scarves/dopattasthat used to be worn with a kamiz, forget it.
Hair-covering and breast-draping are out, except for the occasional village
woman on some errand in the city for which she's likely to have dolled herself up in a sequined sari no city girl
would be caught dead in.In so far as the
village belle is entering an alien world, the glitter might be seen
as battle dress.Good for her.

During all these miles I’ve covered on Metro, I’ve
encountered only one woman in an old fashioned black burqa, but even she was not fully
conforming.For safety’s sake, or to see
the world around her, she’d thrown up the face flap.And then there was the slender girl wearing
jeans and a nicely shaped shirt, a combination which (to my Western
eyes) looked great on her beautiful body, although she'd also looped a scruffy scarf incongruously around her neck.The purpose of the scarf emerged as she left the train. She swirled it rapidly over head and hair so only her eyes were visible.Would the neighborhood mullahs be satisfied? Not likely.

No Peacocks

Male attire on Metro is pretty boring: jeans for the young, creased trousers for
the rest, usually paired with a drip-dry shirt, the uniform of the not-so-affluent white collar
worker in the summer.Each trip I'd see a few men who looked to be skilled workers in rumpled, well worn pants and faded shirts or jersies, and once a group of three farmers climbed
aboard at an outlying station.Dressed
in dhoties instead of trousers, long kurtas and towel-like head-wraps, they
spoke in the loud, nasal voices characteristic of the country side.Did they leave their oxen in the parking lot
when they boarded Metro?

What's Missing

I’m not being snide here.I’ve reached the crux of the matter.Metro is very impressive technologically.It’s obviously very popular, too, with office
workers, with tradition-scorning students and solid-looking middle-class women. But here’s my question: although Metro is theoretically accessible to people in poorer colonies and/or slums on either side of the river and even to some fairly rural areas, most riders seem to be doing all right economically. Maybe the poor and those doing low- or no-skilled work consider themselves well-served by buses and commuter trains. But wouldn't they also flock to speedy, air-conditioned metro, if the fare were more affordable? On the other hand, fare-lowering and class-mixing (especially during crush hours) might not please the current clientele and would surely hurt the apparently in-the-black bottom line.

Mass transit is a necessity in a megacity world. But how to do it right? Indian railroads were
built on a not-exactly-dead class system, as airline fares prove.Pay more.Travel very comfortably.Pay less and be grateful to get where you need to
go.Metroappears to be democratic.Everyone pays the same.But some people are being left out.

Which means my long romanticized Delhi of the past
and today’s Delhi aren’t so different. Much to appreciate. Much to mull over.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Ha! Ha! Ha! Not only am I laughing out loud, I’m rolling around on my nice but not outrageously expensive carpet from Pakistan and laughing.

Back in May Mitt Romney was on a begging session among his fellow rich guys in a supposedly safe place, a b(m)illionaires safe house, so to speak, away from the rest of us—yeah, away from us losers, us victims of our own fecklessness, who don’t understand that tax breaks and subsidies for the rich are rewards for achievement while tax breaks and subsidies for the poor and the middle class represent a waste of taxpayers’ money on the lazy and mediocre.

Sorry, got carried away.

The Unsafe Safe House

Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep the riffraff (and/or their sympathizers) out of every banquet or champagne-fueled reception for the rich. In this case, Romney’s remarks got videotaped, some parts have been revealed and now he and his campaign people are neck deep in damage control. Seems that the Republican candidate is uncomfortable with the sound of the sound bites from the plutocratic party.

A Bite That Bites

He should be. This is the biggie: Romney asserted that the 47% of the U.S. population who support the opposition aka Obama have a dependency complex. (I know. This sounds ambiguous. Blame Romney, not me.) That’s nearly half of the U.S. population, folks. Insulted. And I’m one of the slug-a-bugs, it seems. Month after month, year after year, I paid into Medicare and Social Security and now—Horrors!—I’m cashing in on that investment.

Sound bite two suggests that all those lazy louts who support Obama should go out and get a high paying job so they, too, can pay taxes instead of depending on subsidies. Yeah! You can imagine what would happen if I came in the door seeking a job commensurate with my skills and undiminished ability. They’d look at my birth date and laugh. As for those with more recent birth dates, how many people applying for unemployment benefits wouldn’t jump at a job that would support a family–pay the rent, pay the medical bills, buy healthy food, keep the kids in shoes that fit, get them to school in clothes that don’t make their luckier school fellows bully them, buy books....you get the drift. Where are those jobs? Not the fast food jobs. The real jobs. With health benefits so people don’t have to depend on those nefarious government handouts.

According to Romney, even those of us with relatively good jobs weren't and aren’t really paying all that much in taxes, while the much maligned rich are paying through the nose. That all depends on how you do the math, of course. A middle class person, whose taxes come to 25-30% of current income, does indeed pay less in toto than a richer individual. However, when such middle class people pay five figure taxes, the contribution to the common good cuts to the bone of, say, being able to pay college tuitions, whereas when a billionaire's tax bite hits seven figures (or more), all he suffers is the irritation of an ever so slight modification of the budget for fine wines, the number of first class air tickets per annum, the type of luxury car he gives his kids or the annoyance of scrimping on the servant talley to keep up a fifth home in an expensive condo in a sexy world class city. In short, we in the tax-paying middle class have not only been helping the poor (which is fine) but subsidizing the rich—and for decades. And the only thing that seems to trickle down to those of us in the 99% from Romney's perch in the plutocratic stratosphere is scorn—the kind that dripped from this recently revealed Romney failure to find the "elegant" expression. It’s amazing! He should thank us. He should be very grateful that most Americans, acting against their own best interests and increasingly out of touch with the reality of less upward mobility in America, still identify up not down.

Romney Blames the Victims

Back to the jobs issue, which Romney pretends to care about and sees as the justification for keeping the rich rich. Yes, indeed. Lots of jobs have been created by American-based business over the past decades. The trouble is they haven’t been at home. They’ve been in China, India, Thailand, the Dominican Republic—you name it. No wonder Romney wasn't inclined to save an American company manufacturing cars in the U.S. and thus providing jobs for Americans.

Whoops! Sorry. I forgot about the other jobs that have been created by American multi- millionaires. Think of the huge need for maids and gardeners to look after those multiple homes—to say nothing of dock owners, etc., to cater for the multiple yachts. And aviation people to keep the private jets flying at 36,000 feet over the America that Romney's pals would prefer not to see or understand.

Poor Mitt!

Well, I sympathize with Mr. Put-upon Romney over this sound bite thing. I’m firmly with all fair-minded people who object to quotes being taken so brutally out of context that they seem to mean the opposite of what was meant by the naive speaker or writer who uttered or wrote them. This, of course, is not quite the case with the Romney sound bite, which is a fairly accurate stand-in for his political views. Sometimes it's worse to be accurately represented than to be misrepresented.

But here’s where my sympathy really stops. How on earth can Romney complain of being victimized by the sound bite monster when he’s worked overtime to profit by a much nastier version of the same trick?

The Bite the Republicans Gloried Over

Here’s how. Barack Obama made some remarks that were mined for sound bites not too long before the Republican convention. Trying to expose the fallacy of extreme individualism, Obama said something like this: business people don’t build their businesses all by themselves in isolation from the larger society. What he meant was that the most clever, hardworking entrepreneurs need government-built infrastructure, they need good roads and safe skies, they need bacteria-free food to feed their kids and unpolluted water to drink, they need police and fire protection, they need schools to produce able workers, they need a reliable judicial system to protect contracts—all coming from taxpayer funds. Reliable, honest government, regulating sensibly, allows business to succeed in America as it does not in most other places in the world. And so, surely, business people should be just a little thankful to the rest of us for creating the context for their prosperity. Their parents probably helped, too, with emotional support at the very least.

The Republicans pounced on that delicious sound bite. They have tried to make it appear that Obama and his Democrats have no respect whatsoever for the system that did indeed produce prosperity for decades after World War II—until Wall Street, deregulated thanks to collusion between Republicans and the Clinton administration, brought the country to its knees.

In short, the recent Republican convention was built almost wholly on exploiting, in every possible way, this tempting sound bite to discredit Obama and the Democrats.

So please, Mitt, no more complaints about the sound bite monster.

Jobs, not Sneers

And, meanwhile, about those jobs, Mitt. How abound bringing the millions you’ve stashed so mysteriously and conveniently out of sight in the Caymans and Switzerland right home, right now. Show us by example that millionaires are responsible Americans who deserve their tax breaks, that you and the others want to build a healthy U.S. at least as much as you want to enrich yourselves. Do it now. Create more tax payers. Put the money to work. Generate jobs, not just (untaxed) interest income.

Even David Brooks, employed by the New York Times as its premier conservative columnist, couldn’t swallow the Romney line on this one. He asserts that Romney doesn’t understand America—or Americans, who work, by all reliable accounts, harder than any other people on the face of the globe, given the opportunity to do so. Read his column from top to bottom.

But Brooks is indeed a Republican. He tries to protect the Conservative cause by admitting that Romney is running an incompetent campaign. Worse, even as Brooks concedes that a full 47% of the U.S. population isn’t in dependency mode, he fails to mention the obscene subsidies that make the rich ever richer, subsidies that Romney and his backers never deplore. Oil and gas subsidies. Subsidies for rich farmers. That 15% income tax limit for people who make their money on money. And so on.

On the other hand, you can’t call the energy gang losers, can you? Bankers aren’t losers, either. They are gainers. They are winners. The system is rigged to benefit them---and with the Supreme Court's Citizens' United decision helping them to buy elections, they are in a position to stay that way. On top. Gloating. Sneering.

Pass the Hankie, Please

Poor Mitt Romney. He thought he was talking only to the well-oiled in-crowd, the people who were very hopefully interviewing him for the leadership slot, the people who are doing their best to buy him the presidency, the people who expect he will act to protect them, the people who have nothing but contempt for those who haven't made it into the millionaires club—and the word got out.

But this was a real castle with a real history, the Neville’s Raby Castle near Durham, County Durham. One of post Conquest Britain’s early seats of great power, Raby rises with surprising majesty above Yorkshire’s bucolic rolling green fields.

(Above, left to right, Raby Castle, Stable Entrance to Gardens, Raby Castle Gardens. Below, left to right, View from a Gun, Deer in Castle Park, Raby Castle 2. All photos by John C. Dyer)

(Left, Within the Keep, photo by John C. Dyer)

We came to Raby at the request of friends from the States.

This trip was a reunion of sorts. I had missed my college reunion. The couple we accompanied to Raby attended the same small college modeled on Oxford.

Monday, 20 August 2012

Wendi Maxwell brings personal insight and occasional stories from California, particularly the strange world of California politics and the new left. Maxwell is a former policy maker for California adult literacy projects

Let’s face it. I went to Europe looking for trouble.

This past year, I’ve followed the adventures of Occupy Oakland with great interest. I thought our vacation to Germany this summer might provide me with other examples of grassroots demonstrations. Europe had been simmering with demonstrations against ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) for months now. Perhaps I could find a demonstration while I was in Berlin.

Berlin did indeed bring me a street demonstration on the famous Unter Den Linden. A small crowd of demonstrators with costumes, drums, and signs gathered outside an expensive marble-clad business tower. Across the street, police watched with amusement. This was not the big blac block mob I had wanted, but I thought I’d check it out anyway.

“Guten tag! English anyone?”, I called out. It turned out the demonstrators were a mixture of Germans, Americans, Greeks, and Spaniards. Everyone spoke English. What were they demonstrating? The corporatization of art, as exemplified by a gallery show underwritten by Deutsche Bank. The demonstrators were upset. Not only did artists have to pay their way in, but there were no free admissions for anyone – even for students. The German demonstrators in particular were incensed that no one was providing them with subsidies for their art. (In Berlin, they take their art seriously.) (Photo by Wendi Maxwell, June 2012 above: Berlin Protester).

I approached one demonstrator with a cardboard sign on a stick. “I write about Occupy Oakland. Can I take your picture? Can I write about you?” “Occupy Oakland?” came the response – “Man they’re hard core.”

“Yeah” I said. “Did you know that if you had that sign in Oakland, with a stick holding it up, you’d be arrested for carrying a weapon? And possibly beaten with your own stick?”

“Well,” mused the demonstrator, “these police don’t take us very seriously. There’s only five of them and they’re pretty relaxed.” And on travelling further down the street I realized that the police were not really there because of the demonstration. They were there because St. Hedwig’s Berlin Cathedral was celebrating the Mass of Corpus Christi and hundreds of clerics were processing through a parallel boulevard. The police were there for the Church, not for Art. (Photo by Wendi Maxwell, June 2012 above: Protester with a weapon).

A couple of days later we were in Dresden and ran across flyers advertising a Pirate Party mass demonstration against ACTA. Aha! Here was the demonstration I had looked for in Berlin.

We went to the square at noon, but found it full of guitar-strumming evangelicals dancing and serving free curry lunch. Eventually I located two protestors – one with a bullhorn, and one with a sign, again on a stick. A block away I located another two demonstrators and directed them toward the first ones. No further demonstrators emerged. I did get a chance to learn about ACTA though… (ACTA sought to establish laws governing piracy of goods and the Internet. It was later defeated in the European Parliament.)(Photo left by Wendi Maxwell, June 2012: ACTA Protesters in Dresden).